Opening Reception of “Instruments of Change” at Fullerton Museum Center

Thank you to all those who joined us for the opening reception of “Instruments of Change” and the closing party for Designer Con. It was a busy week for the Thinkspace Family and we appreciate all those who come out to support the artists we love.

Now through March 1, 2020, the entire Fullerton Museum Center is transformed for “Instruments of Change” showcasing site-specific murals and installation from 8 Latin American artists; Saner, Curiot, Poni, Fernando Charmarelli, Paola Delfin, Alvaro Naddeo, Zezao, and Fefe Talavera. 

Don’t miss out on this stunning exhibition.

THINKSPACE PROJECTS presents INSTRUMENTS OF CHANGE

Thinkspace Projects is honored to present Instruments of Change at the Fullerton Museum Center,  a groundbreaking exhibition that transforms the museum with site-specific murals by 8 Latin-American street artists. This will be the first time in history that a US museum has hosted this kind of art show. In mid-November, the Fullerton Museum Center will open its doors to Alvaro Naddeo, Curiot, Fefe Talavera, Fernando Chamarelli, Hilda Palafox (aka Poni), Paola Delfin, Saner, and Zezao, giving them 10 days to create a series of large-scale murals and installations. The new work will be revealed on November 24 with an opening reception from 6pm to 10pm, in tandem with the closing party of DesignerConInstruments of Change will be on view until February 23, 2020. In addition, the Instruments of Change: A Compendium exhibition will be on view up the street at the Fullerton College Art Gallery on the campus of the Fullerton College, from January 30 to February 19, 2020.

Dedicated to full-inclusion, all materials, signage, and advertising will be presented in both English and Spanish. “We really want to welcome in a portion of the SoCal community that is often overlooked and neglected by the area’s museums,” says Andrew Hosner, co-owner and curator of Thinkspace Projects. “We are very excited and honored to have the opportunity to put together a show of this caliber for a Southern California based institution. The street art culture throughout Mexico and South America is rich with history and has so many varied styles. Following in the footsteps of the ‘Vitality and Verve’ exhibitions that we curated at the Long Beach Museum of Art, ‘Instruments of Change’ aims to shine a spotlight on some of the most innovative artists from Latin America.”

“Much like the featured muralists in Instruments of Change, The Fullerton Museum Center seeks to engage, inform, inspire, and, when necessary, challenge the viewer,” says Kelly Chidester, curator for the Fullerton Museum Center. “We are excited to partner with Thinkspace to bring this socially conscious and timely exhibit to Fullerton as a celebration of art, culture and powerful storytelling.”

Instruments of Change will feature a diversity of artistic styles, ranging from photorealistic black and white portraiture to colorful, abstract works with indigenous aesthetics. Some artists in the show, such as Paola Delfín and Saner, have a track record of crafting intricately detailed, building-sized murals, while others like Zezao and Curiot often create work out of the public view in obscure locations like sewers and jungles.

The birthplace of the low-brow art movement, as well as a nexus of many cultures’ creatives, LA has become a destination for street artists over the past few decades. The unique art scene allowed many Hispanic-American graffiti artists to transcend the streets and thrive in fine art settings—Thinkspace Gallery being among them. Instruments of Change marks a new chapter in the story of street art’s evolution, and starts its next decade on a whole new level.

Instruments of Change will be on view at Fullerton Museum Center from November 24, 2019 to February 23, 2020. The museum is located at 301 N. Pomona Ave. Fullerton, California 92832.

Jolene Lai’s ‘Short Stories’ Solo Exhibition taking place at the Fullerton Museum Center Opens This Weekend

Los Angeles-based artist Jolene Lai will be showing a collection of works in “Short Stories” at the Fullerton Museum Center this fall.

We invite our Orange County supporters to come out to the opening reception of the exhibition is Saturday, August 25th from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

“Short Stories” will be on view from August 25th through October 21st.

Jolene Lai works primarily with oil on canvas or mixed media on watercolor paper. With bold use of color, shape and intricate detail, she creates images with a seductive aesthetic and subject matter that weaves in emotions of whimsy, melancholy, irony, and absurdity.

Lai seeks to engage her audience in works that are approachable, newly imagined spaces that the viewer is invited to explore on their own terms.

Interview with Jana & Js for “Fragments of Memories” at Fullerton Museum Center

This Summer, Thinkspace Projects, is proud to present Jana & Js at the Fullerton Museum Center in Fullerton, CA. Their latest body of work Fragments of Memories will be on view from June 30th to August 19th.  Below is our interview with Jana & Js to discuss the inspiration behind Fragments of Memories, their creative process, and the artistic catalyst that lead them to where they are today.

Fragments of Memories opens at the Fullerton Museum Center June 30th.

SH: Tell us about your new works on view at the Fullerton Museum Center this summer. What is the inspiration? What were you exploring in the work?

J&J: “Memories” are the main inspiration for this body of work. All the images that we painted were inspired by our memories, or feelings induced by past moments. The objects we painted on are carrying history and memories from others. All the pieces we’re presenting for this show are painted on found objects, assemblages of wood fragments that we found in abandoned houses or factories.
These objects had a previous life, all the objects have accompanied people in their everyday life or in their work. We love to think about all the history they possess and use it to mark time passing in our work.

SH: Where do you source inspiration? How do you capture those ideas for pieces; do either of you have a sketchbook on hand or is it just notes to yourselves in your phone?

J&J: We don’t really have a sketchbook, for that kind of work. It’s more of a notebook where we are writing ideas, phrases, lyrics…Our camera would be our sketchbook. The basis of our stencil work is our photographic work. We take a lot of pictures…and some of them will be transferred into paintings.

SH: How do you plan out your compositions? Is there a clear break in who does what between you?

J&J: At the very beginning there was a real separation, Jana used to paint all the portraits, and JS the architectural part of our works. After a while, we completely merged our work. We take the pictures together, cut the stencils together and we are even painting on the canvases at the same time.

A couple of years ago when our first kid was born we started to do some parts of our process more separately. But we still do the basis together: photos, stencils, deciding the background and the composition of a painting.

SH: What excites you about your work / creative process?

J&J: We never get bored of what we are doing. We love our “job” and living something special like that together is the most exciting thing for us.
Being able to be creative, travel, discover new environments, meet new people together is amazing. And being able to perpetually share ideas and build our work is thrilling.

SH: What frustrates you about your work / creative process?

J&J: Right now, what frustrates us the most is not having enough time to experiment more.

SH: How do you approach developing work for an exhibition? Do you immediately jump into work on it, or do you find yourselves procrastinating some?

J&J: When we start to work on a show we usually won’t go to the studio and start to paint immediately. We have a pretty long period of reflexion, exchanging ideas, looking for images and materials… it will take a while before all the elements that will compose a new body of work will find their right place. And when it does, we will start to build the pieces and paint them.

SH: Has there been an artistic catalyst in your lives? Something, someone, some event that made a significant impact on either of you that has lead you to where you both are now.

J&J: What lead us to where we are now is definitely the fact that we met 15 years ago in Madrid, Spain. Before that, we weren’t planning on becoming artists, and since then everything seems so natural that we couldn’t imagine doing something else. If we would name someone, the French artist, Artiste-Ouvrier definitely had a determinant role in the development of our work: both on technical and ethical levels.

The Timeline of Jana & Js:

1981 JS – birth in Paris, France
1985 Jana – birth in Salzburg Austria
2003 Jana and Js meet each other in Madrid, Spain and
live there for a year
2004 Js starts to work with stencils
2005 back in Paris, Js develops the stencil technics with Artiste-Ouvrier
2005 foundation of the collective WCA (Working Class Artists)
2005 Jana studies Art History at the University of Vienna, Austria
2006 Jana comes to live in Paris, Jana & Js are starting
to work together as a duo
2007 first show with the name as Jana & Js
2008 Jana & Js move to Salzburg, Austria.
Jana studies Multimedia Art at the University of
applied sciences in Salzburg 2012 birth of their son
2014 birth of their daughter

Austrian and French street artists Jana & Js are painting together since 2006. The pair creates polychromed stencil murals widely ranging in size. Based primarily on their personal photographic work, the stencils seem to respond and interact with their surroundings. Mostly inspired by the city and people living in, their paintings merge urban landscape or architecture details with portrait, questioning the place of human being in the modern cities. Inspired by the place where they put their work they now focus on nostalgia, melancholy.

After spending some time in Madrid, Spain where they met and living a couple of years in Paris, Jana & Js are now settled in Salzburg – Austria. To display their works, they choose old materials that are showcasing the passing of physical time and history. They have made their art in unexpected spaces by printing stencils on public infrastructure or on the semi-finished/dismantled products/spaces such as the train tracks, old buildings, poles, pieces of concrete, old trucks, wood piles…

They are deeply inspired by every place they travel to, deciphering the social meaning in unforeseen aspects of urban landscapes. But what is the most striking part in their works are not panoramas themselves, but people with their existential uneasiness. They have the unique way of relating people, their emotions, desires, and concerns with their environment. Their urban interventions merge their subjects with the environment, provoking thoughts and engaging the viewers in an artistic dialogue.

 

ICY & SOT’s HUMAN (NATURE) OPENING AT FULLERTON MUSEUM CENTER

Icy & Sot continue to produce thought-provoking work that reflects the troubles of our times in a new series of public works created as a response to the travel-ban in the US.  Juxtapoz highlights the work as a continued departure from their classic stencil based pieces, which was first seen at the opening of Human (Nature) in November 2017 at our gallery.

We are excited to announce that pieces from Human (Nature) will be shown at the Fullerton Museum Center, with an opening reception tomorrow, Friday, January 26th.

We look forward to introducing Icy & Sot’s Human (Nature) to a new audience in Orange County.

ICY and SOT
Human (Nature)

Curated by Thinkspace

On view Jan 27 – March 18
Opening Reception: 6-9PM

Fullerton Museum Center
301 N. Pomona Avenue
Fullerton, CA 92832
Phone (714)738-6545
http://ci.fullerton.ca.us/museum/